Homekit Automations are broken in iOS 16

My complete installation from

scratch on a new home works perfectly now. It took me lot of time and screenshots of all devices and automation rules. I also updated all my Shelly’s to the last software release available just to be sure it’s compatible. No glitches and no strange things happening anymore on the fresh installation.

My Home App is Fixed (for now);  Could there be a bug in tvOS 16 Home and/or IOS 16?

Just to recap: I have been using Home devices in my Smarthome for about 4 years.  lt was working great (Hey Siri commands, timers, remote control all working flawlessly).  But within hours of downloading iOS 16, all my 12 Thread devices stopped responding.  My other 29 non-Thread devices still worked OK.  I removed and did factory resets on the failed Thread devices (Eve/NanoLeaf/Wemo) and then tried many times to add them back into Home but all failed.  Frustrated, I removed from storage some older non-Thread devices and added them in to Home to replace the Thread failed devices:  all the non-Thread older devices I added back worked OK.

So I read a lot in the forum Support pages and saw several people with issues, but mine appeared to be unique in that it was only my Thread devices that failed.  I deleted Home App, factory reseted router, but was **** if I was going to start from scratch all over.  Even though my Thread devices communicated much faster I could live without them, but I was still very ****** that something in iOS 16 broke my Home setup.

Yesterday I was looking in my Home settings and noticed I had five (5) Hubs listed: two HomePod minis and three Apple TV 4Ks.  All three 4K were disabled; one HP mini was connected and the other HP mini was Standby.  I remember when I bought my three 4Ks back in May 2021 I decided I did not want or need them to control Home App so I Disabled Hub setting on all three.  I felt my two HP minis were adequate and I would never need to control any of my devices from the Home App on any of the three Apple TV.  I remembered reading in the Support forum that one user deleted his Apple TV as a Hub and got favorable results.  So, I decided to “Sign Out of iCloud on all my three Apple TVs.  The minute I did that I got a push notice on my iPhone that the front door is closed (Eve sensor (Thread) I forgot to remove).  Now I have been successful in adding back three Eve motion (Thread) sensors and they are all working fine.  I will wait a few days until I add back the other Thread devices.

But here is my dilemma:  In order for me to enjoy Apple TV+ programming on any of my 3 ATV 4Ks, I have to sign in with my Apple ID.  The screen prompts me to bring an iPhone/iPad close in or to sign in manually.  If I use my iPhone to get the ATV signed it, the ATV forces me to install Home App.  Of course I could “Disable” Home in the TV settings but I am Leary it will cause issues again.  So, I have elected to sign in “manually” my Apple ID on my ATVs which did not force me to install Home.

So is there an issue with tvOS 16 and Home and/or iOS 16.  For Apple:  please don’t force me to install Home on my TV 4ks cuz I will never command control my Home like this, and since I have two iPod minis I will never use my ATV 4Ks as hubs.  Even though my three 4K TVs had Home disabled for several months, something in either tvOS 16 or iOS 16 triggered and knocked all my 12 Thread devices off-line.  All seems to be working fine now:  Home devices are faster and more robust with Thread so I hope problem stay away.

Still puzzling is why Apple forces Home install on an Apple TV if and iPhone or iPad is used to auto sign-in, but if manually sign-in with an Apple ID is select no Home App is installed.

Hope all the above helps others.

Ok today I was told to try this with my own broken HomeKit automations (4 lights I control )

“Is the AppleTV your only HomeKit hub? If it is, and the Home app on your iOS app has no issues with testing automations, it's possible that the AppleTV doesn't have a clean download of the HomeKit data from iCloud. A reboot won't fix that. But this should:

On the Apple TV, sign out of iCloud. Once you've done that, now reboot the AppleTV (A soft restart via the System menu is good enough). Once the device is back up, sign back into iCloud. Allow 10 mins for the HomeKit config to re-download. See if your automations run after that.

Oh and if they are time or location based, the AppleTV needs Location Services to be on so it knows where it is.”

I followed this (my location services was on) and now my automations work at least the first time we will see it this remains fixed hopefully it will.

OK, I'm starting to understand why my "complete" installation from scratch was a solution, but from what I'm reading it looks like many don't need to go that far.

I see a lot of comments that talk about signing off and on again with iCloud account on the Apple TV which should rebuild the config from iCloud on the Apple TV.

What I forgot to mention in my previous reply, is that also my old installation was on another iCloud user account (my wife's account) on the Apple TV, which I have renewed to my own iCloud account while settings things up again. SO, in fact everything is installed on a "fresh and unused iCloud account".

So, I'm really starting to believe the rumors that it might be caused by corrupted data on the Apple TV which requires a reset to rebuild the config again.

I can also confirm what many others are noticing, that with my newly installed home I have the feeling that all devices are more responsive than before.

This is the case for Shelly devices, devices linked to bridges via Home Assistant, even RF and IR devices that are running via a Broadlink plugin on a Homebridge that is running on docker in Synology. I really don't notice any delays in any of the manual tasks or automations anymore.

I would still try to play around with the accounts on the AppleTV to get it solved.

I also logged off on my AppleTV, reboot and login again. A whole procedure started up to connect my iPhone and and my AppleTV to Homekit as well. Even it asked where the Hub was standing (for me in the living room)

Lets see what happen. For me it was problem that our 2 iPhones sometimes left home without leaving and still connected to the WiFi (same network as the AppleTV).

Also can confirm most timed automations have failed since iOS 16 and tvOS update rolled out. I have way too many automations and devices to consider setting up everything again (like others said).

It is sounding more like a hub issue than anything on the device. I'm going to try resetting all my Apple 4Ks and see if that helps anything.

After a couple of weeks since "updating" to OS16 on my devices my Automations have now stopped working. All Scenes vanished from the Home app (iPad) and Automations showed "no accessories or scenes". Oddly I can created new scenes but cannot use the same name as the missing ones.

Evidently my Homekit settings have become corrupted. One possible reason is that I unplugged my Original Homepods due to an approaching thunderstorm (they are irreplaceable!). This meant that the Apple TV 4K took over as the primary Hub. Maybe during this changeover the Homekit Settings were messed up?

I just tested this hypothesis by unplugging the Homepod that was the primary Hub. As expected the Apple TV took over as the primary Hub. So far the Home app is displaying the Scenes that I created before unplugging the Homepod but an Automation did not work.

So I might be faced with deleting my Home entirely and creating a new one - reinstalling accessories and recreating automations and scenes - Grrr!

A possible issue/fix is that my Apple TV was connected by ethernet. I unplugged the cable so it is connected by wifi and Homekit seems more stable. There are reports of Apple TV misbehaving when connected with ethernet.

I will monitor how it goes over the next 24 hrs when my Automations activate (or not).

Update: Can confirm that (for me at least) this is a hub issue and not an issue with the Home App itself.  I went to each Apple TV and went to Settings -> System -> Reset and Update and reconfigured each potential hub.  All my Apple TV’s are on Ethernet as well.  All automations seem working again, and I didn’t have to change anything in the Home App.

While it’s not super easy to reset the Apple TV’s, it’s way easier than setting up all the devices, scenes and automations in the Home App.

Connecting the AppleTV by wifi instead of ethernet did not work. I have now changed the Apple TV settings to disable it as a Home Hub. An original Homepod is now the primary hub.

i have deleted all old Automations and created replacements. So far they seem to be working.

Same here: sadly after 3 days working, the five Thread devices I was successfully able to add back for testing have all stopped working as on this morning. I really don't want to have to delete my entire Home and start setting up from scratch because I am not optimistic this will work. Has anyone done this and found the problems resolved after several days?

Thanks. I did all the steps you suggest, and I was able to add back my Thread devices (only added back a few for test purposes). But all the Thread bulb/plugs/door sensors/motion have failed again as of this morning. I see many other having issues but I appear to be the only one where Thread devices fail. I can add back numerous non-Thread devices and they all stay working. Very frustrating.

Deleting the Home App required I remove my two HP minis. The Factory Reset steps use to be very easy in the past (unplug, wait 10 secs, hold finger on top until red spinning circle/3 beeps, but it has now become very difficult to do a reset. Anyone else notice this issue with HP mini factory resets? Am wondering if these HP mini hubs could be causing issues with Home.

I found a problem is in the HomePods. For some reason some did not recognize my account login anymore and I had to reset them. Fortunately it’s real easy to reset a HomePod and I only took a few minutes.

Everything seems to be working OK now. The speakers were set up to automatically update and for some reason they weren’t updating either.

An odd thing happened this morning which suggests that the Homekit data is getting corrupted. Several scenes vanished from the Home app when I first had problems. I created new ones but Home wouldn't let me use the same name. This morning the automation that uses one of the scenes didn't work (again). When I looked at the Home app on my Watch it displayed the old scene names. I tapped on the one to activate the outlets and it worked. I scrolled down to look at accessories and when I scrolled back to the scenes the active one had changed to the new scene name.

Anyway, in view of the advice in a previous post about Apple working on the issue (!) I think I will wait to see if a fix comes out. I expect that we will all need to delete Home and set up everything again once a fix is available.

I might put those outlets on clockwork timers until then. Grrr!